Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

The 400mm f2.8 was probably a mistake. A 600mm f4 cost about the same, but I figured that the 400mm and teleconverter combo would give me more flexibility, be a little lighter, and focus a little closer. But the 400mm is a mnaul focus lens, and sometimes gets a downright ugly bokeh.

So here it is, spring 2007, birds are out and it’s time to see how the K10D and teleconverter combination works with the new digital body. My standard birding setup is the A* 400 f2.8, combined with the AF adapter 1.7x. This is an unusual teleconverter – 1.7x magnification of the image, plus the elements in the converter couple with the camera’s autofocus system, allowing for some very limited autofocus capability – just enough to snap a pre-focused image into sharpness. (In all fairness to it – the 1.7x AF adpater works quite well on fast normal to short telephoto lenses.)

So yesterday I set up the birding rig and tried for a few test shots of the robins and sparrows in the backyard. Since small little jpegs, like the one above, don’t tell a thing about image quality. So here is an actual pixels crop of the Robin’s head:

And here is an actual pixel crop of the bird’s shoulder:

This shot was taken at an effective aperture of f8 (lens set to f 4.6, with the teleconverter multiplying the aperture to f 8). This shot was taken as a RAW DNG file, opened with Adobe Camera Raw. Aside from tweaking the color temperature a bit, the detail (sharpness) was dialed up to 60. ISO for both shots was 400. The image was opened without any up-sampling.

Overall, the A* 400 f2.8, AF 1.7x converter, and K10D produces excellent sharpness and detail. AN AF360 FGZ, set to –5 flash compensation, was used for fill. The camera was, of course, mounted on a tripod. The heavy duty ball head was left to rotate and swivel freely, allowing the camera to be quickly positioned. This was my standard setup for birds with film in the past, and works well with the digital setup.

One disappointment with the K10D was that the slow flash synch setting does not work with older, manual focus lenses. I don’t know why that design feature is there – but it’s documented in the manual. Since fill flash is essential for many birding situations, a slow synch setting on the camera is a real boon. My older Pentax film SLR’s didn’t provide for this – so I would shoot birds in manual mode, manually selecting the shutter speed. I found that I had to resort to that again shooting with the A* 400 setup on the K10D.

(I’ll be testing the slow synch setting on some autofocus lenses, where it should work.)

I was also hoping to test the K10D anti-shake function while birding – but here human error crept in. With a manual focus lens you have to input the focal length when using the anti-shake feature. I don’t know what I was thinking, but for some reason I kept inputting 550mm, instead of the 700mm I should of put in. (The 1.7x teleconverter and 400mm lens are and effective 680 mm.) So – I can confirm that anti-shake really does need accurate focal length input. Whether or not it would work well with a lens loosely mounted on a tripod has yet to be seen.

I plan to continue birding tests, and hope to report more in the future.

The seasons are changing with astounding speed. Just three weeks ago I was outside in the 25 degree temperatures, capturing the last snow crystal shots of the season. Two week sago I ventured into the Allegan forest, only to get stuck in almost a foot of wet, slushy snow on one of the side roads.

But then by the middle of this week I was able to snap a shot of a bee dancing in a crocus flower. Yesterday I ventured back into the Allegan Forest, only to find the snow all but gone – just a few traces lingering on the north side of hills and ditches. The roads were not only clear, they were dry, and very first blue hepatica already were blooming! Spring is indeed coming up fast.

I was glad to be able to get into the Allegan forest after the winter reprieve. While the small seasonal roads remained passable until mid January, once the winter snows began to fall in earnest there was no way to get back into the woods – at least not with my car. So the trips that I mad out there were all pretty superficial, just short excursions from the main roads, hikes back into the woods a bit. Usually I was walking (without snow shoes) in knee to thigh deep snow, which made even those short hikes difficult.

Yesterday I was able to venture back into some the Oak Savanna clearings. These are bleak places yet, but already the vegetation is starting to come to life.

The snow melt off was hurried along by a few days of heavy rains, so there was a tremendous amount of water run off. But the extremely sandy soil in the Allegan Forrest was already pretty dry. The thick moss that carpets the ground in many areas of the pine barrens was soft and spongy – by June it will be dry and crunchy.

My first walk around was in a section of Oak Savanna north of the Kalamazoo River. It’s a great place to get photos of all sorts of butterflies and dragonflies in the summer, and is also the home to a lot of interesting birds and, of course, deer. There wasn’t much happening here on this day – I did fine a hawk’s feather jabbed into the ground, and a few other feathers and small bones laying on the ground. Perhaps an unwary hawk swoped in to scavenge a bite from an animal carcass, and was nabbed by a fox or a coyote.

I then followed the road back to a bluff overlooking the Kalamazoo river. It must be turkey season, because there were several hunters blasting away in the woods. At the top of the bluff I found that a tree that had been hanging onto the sandy hilltop had fallen over since I was last there. This is a spot where people come to shoot skeets and have bon fires, so it looks like there will be an good supply of wood for future fires.

In the pine forest along the top of the bluff, I became interested in the details of the bark of the pine trees. I took several shots,, trying to capture the patterns and sometimes very bright colors found in the tree bark. These were not typical pictures of trees – but a fun and interesting subject for exploration nonetheless.

I then made my way down the steep trail to the river’s bank. The water was well into flood stages and the trees in the flood plain made for another interesting photographic topic.

But then as I was turning back, I was surprised to see blue hepatica already flowering on the hillside I had just climbed down. I assume that the steep, south facing hillside warmed up quickly, resulting in the flowers blooming at this early time. I was doubly surprised because the Allegan Forest, as former farm land, there are few solid patches of woodland wildflowers there at all. And these hepatica definitely were a week or two ahead of what I’d expect, since the harbinger of Spring (a few samples of which were also found in Allegan) is just starting to bloom in Kalamazoo.

But it was a welcome surprise and I was able to snap the first wildflowers shots of the year. Given my work schedule I won’t be able to devote the time and effort to wildflowers that I would like. But – I’ll be pursuing them as much as possible.

After leaving the river I made stops to several other areas within the forest. Like I said, the snow was gone but there were still several large mud patches in the roads. I delt with these by just revving up to 40 or 50 mph, and plowing through them - relying on the momentum of the car to carry me through the muck, which in several cases was deep enough and thick enough to snag the car.

I didn’t see any bees, and the first dragonflies of the year are probably just in the process of migrating up from southern Illinois and Indiana. But – they will be here soon.

Other photos from the day:

So here it is – the first full day of spring. Every March I hope to glean a shot of a honey bee in one of the handful of crocus flowers that bloom in the yard. This year was no exception, and with the sudden arrival of a warm front, I went out late this evening to see if the bees were buzzing.

One lone Apis mellifera was out, making her way through the crocus flowers. Last weekend I devised a new flash bracket to work with the Pentax K10D, and I wanted to try it out and also get a preliminary assessment of the K10D’s anti-shake feature for macro shots.

The bee didn’t hang around for long – was already past 7 pm when I stepped out and the sun was setting into a cloud bank, that is drizzling rain as I type this. I still used the Slik monopod, but the K10D and the flash worked well – a happy harbinger of future insect images to come over the next few months.

Last fall I noted that honey bees are among the first and the last of all insects to appear in spring and fall, and once again they made their arrival right on schedule. And to think that a few weeks ago I doubted that it would be even close to warm enough by now for a bee, or any insect, to appear.

I've been worried about the bees this spring. A new disease is killing off the domestic honey bees, so I wondered if I would see any. But I saw this one, and that makes me glad for now.

As I've noted many times before, you never know when you see the last bug - either the last of the season or the last forever. Its only in hide-sight that you say "Hey, that was the last time..."

This won't be the last time - but I worry that, with the plight of the honey bee, there will be a last time that I see a honey bee, Apis mellifera.

The flash bracket is one of the usual contrivances, made from hardware store L-braces and other bits and bobs. A photo of it, with the K10D and A*200 f4 macro, is shown below.

Home made is alright by me.

This little bee stands in stark contrast to the toy camera shots I posted yesterday. If you love subject matter then well gosh, here you got a cute bug and a pretty flower. But I love the bees just as I love the little dots and toy camera shots.

In the end, it’s all the same stuff..

"And all I see are little dots Some are smeared, some are spots..." -- Talking Heads

And what for? After all, I could just be shooting away with toy cameras, where even the crappiest shot is made even crappier by lens distortions and light leaks.

A toy camera (or two) is a standard item in my car these days. The Holga is ever present, and for a change of pace I grab a $1 Special Moments Focus Free camera loaded with 35mm film.  

So today I cobbled together an update consisting of images taken with toy, krappy, and other than standard cameras, featured here...

Do spots of light qualify as a “subject?” Does it matter if the spots in Night Driving are streetlights, while the dots in Little Dots are just sunlight on window curtains?

I don’t think so… The toy camera kitsch of course is a plus, but I just like the dots. Maybe connecting them is the challenge. 

Buses

For those interesting in film and developing - Holga shots were taken on Classic Pan 400, developed in HC110 Dilution H. The 35mm Special Moments shots were taken on Fuji Neopan 400, developed in Rodinal 1:25. All exposures were pushed 1 stop.

The sun is finally shining here in west Michigan - something that is pretty rare in the winter months. And yesterday the bight sun was an invitation to test out the infrared capabilities of the Pentax K10D.

I’m a big fan on infrared photography, both in film and digital form. But with dwindling options for infrared film, I’ve been increasingly shooting digital infrared using a Hoya RM90 filter. (For specifics, click here for my digital IR tutorial.) So with the arrival of the Pentax K10D, I've been eager to see how it will perform with the IR filter.

The blood red images on the LCD were pretty cool, but aside from that first impression the camera does not seem to be a good candidate for digital IR.

Here's a summary of my impressions:

- The K10D has much better IR blocking than the *ist-D. Using the *ist-D my normal exposure with the RM90 filter was 4-15 seconds at f 16. With the K10D it took more like 20-30 seconds at f8 or f5.6. ISO 1600 was used in both cases.

- Sensor flare is a much bigger issue with the K10D than the *ist-D. About half the shots I tried were ruined by sensor flare.

- The snowy landscape without any foliage was not a good test of IR capabilities. But my initial impressions are that the IR effect is pretty weak. Where are the black skies and plaster white trees? Maybe things will be different in the summer.

For the time being, it looks like I'll be sticking with the *ist-D for digital infrared work, and maybe ultimately moving up to a modified / dedicated IR DSLR. (which will probably mean opting for a Canon or Nikon of some sort;)

Yesterday I headed off to the Allegan Forest for the first time in several weeks. I had visited the forest in early winter, and again during some the coldest days of late January. But yesterday was the first really warm day we’ve had for some time, so I was eager to head out and see how the forest looked.

Allegan is closer to the lake than Kalamazoo, and so it gets a lot more snow. Lake effect snow. And as I headed down the main dirt roads, time and time again I saw some of my favorite two track roads, all too buried in snow to be passable. At least in my Subaru.

Finally I made my way to 121st street – definitely not a two track, and definitely a well traveled road. But still a seasonal road, not plowed or cleared of snow in the winter.

There were a lot of vehicle tracks leading down 121st street, and so I decided to head in. After a couple dozen yards I realized that the slushy melting snow under the wheels was not working. I decided to back out – and carefully started to back up towards the main road.

It only took a second to slide off the packed down tire tracks and slip into the deep, slushy snow. The car stopped, the wheels spun, and for all my rocking forward and back, I was stuck for good.

So there I was. I called home, my wife looked up a wrecker service in Allegan on the internet, I called them and waited for the truck to come. In the pre-cellphone days I would of had to walk the mile or so to the ranger station (whcih is often empty) or flagged down a passing motorist (who are rather scarce out in the woods.)

I had set aside the day to try to scrounge out some photos – so, while I was waiting I figured I may as well take a few shots.

Stuck in the woods under blue skies with the sun shining through the trees. The obvious landscapes shots were wanting. I started to think about Harry Callahan and his shots of grass stalks in the snow. Instead of grass stalks in the snow, I was captivated with the shadows of small saplings and tree branches – really twigs – on the snow. And so I spent half and hour shooting shadows in the snow. I probably wouldn’t of done it if I hadn’t gotten stuck there, but I’m glad I did. No masterpieces, no compelling photos – but an interesting exercise, maybe something worth pursuing in the future.

When the wrecker came we tried digging the car out of the snow with shovels. I don't think the truck operator wanted to venture too far back on the side road. qq It didn’t work. The slushy snow was compacted into ice half a foot down – and it was on that ice that I was just spinning my wheels.

So we hooked my car up to the truck with a long rope and with one small tug it wound up back on the packed down snow – the path I was originally trying to follow. A minute or two in reverse and I was back on the plowed road, $75 poorer but better for the time spent among the shadows.

From there I decided to head to safer ground, so I drove over to South Haven the check out the lighthouse. A few weeks ago I had been there in a howling snow squall, but today all was calm. It was also uncannily warm, as I walked out onto the pier in shirt sleeves, the ice on the pier melted or melting.

The lighthouse was still fringed with icicles – but with predicted highs up around 60 F in the next few days, these won’t last.

As usual, a steady stream of photographers was snapping away at the lighthouse. I always enjoy my visits to the lake - but lihthouses are sort of a subject matter of last resort. I probably would have done better to have stuck with the shadows and snow, whether stuck in the snow or not. Here it is, mid March, and the winter is fading fast. I once shot a honey bee in a crocus bloom on the 19th of March. This year the news is that the honey bees have suffered a drastic die-off over the winter, so maybe no bees this year. But something will come along. A lot of snow has to melt – but things should be picking up in the weeks ahead.

“If the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing, gets his tail in the water, nothing is accomplished..”  -- I Ching

It snowed yesterday – the old snow of late winter. And though I had a head stuffed up with a cold, I spent the day outside in the chill, patiently holding out glass in the air, catching snow crystals, working with lighting in the garage.

Odds are, this is the last snowflake photography session of the season. I started experimenting with snow flake photography almost a decade ago (how the time flies!) and lookiing back over those years, I’ve only had one or two productive sessions after February. Looking ahead, the temperatures are projected to rise into the 50’s this upcoming week – and once it gets that warm, the good snow is gone for good.

Ah – but this last session was the best of the year, perhaps the only session of the year that was worth while. In a way, the 6 or 7 hours I spent outside in the chill yesterday was the ultimate result of the hours spent in the cold.

Perfect snow crystals are nice, but "perfection" is so limited. It is a trite, human idea (all too human) that ultimately simply mimics and mocks the truth. Perfection is the tyrant that demands conformity. Perfection is a pre-conception that stifles spontaneity and experiment.

The truth lies in imperfections. The truth is the wrinkle in the fabric, the scratches around the key hole, the tarnish and scratches in the bright metal. And if photography is a means of searching for the truth, then photography must be liberated from the quest for perfection. All that perfection gets you is the pretty post card, the facile model, the tintype landscape.

Walking across the ice, like a little fox, perfection weaves a net of cracks and weak spots, traps for the unwary, places to get your tail wet.

When I posted about the second session of snow crystal photography for this season – back on December 8 – I prefaced the post with a quote from the I Ching – hexagram 64, Wei Chi / Before Completion (working off the Wilhelm translation). This is a situation where every line is in the wrong place, and by being so every line is in the perfect relationship to its corresponding line.

I don’t know why I put that line from the I Ching in that post – but looking back it suddenly makes sense – the concept of Imperfect Symmetry that I’ve been groping for in these shots is really embodied in that hexagram. And as Wilhelm notes, it’s a joyous and optimistic observation, despite the perfect imperfection of the figure.

(Ye gods – now I have to wonder what I was thinking when I slapped that line from the Waste Land in that post…)

But imperfection has yet more pitfalls. Too many trails head into infinite directions – and all of them are wrong. The greatest strength of chaos is that it is the default position – there are limited ways to be ordered, but infinite forms of disorder.

But looking at yesterday’s snow crystals, I finally see the balance of order and chaos that I’ve been striving for all year. The first crystal shown at the start of this post is like a battered shield – only 4 out of 6 dendrites still intact, one major gash in its side. It looks like a well worn shield – one that protected its holder against many an attack.

The next snow crystal is even more worn – and perhaps worn in an even more beautiful pattern. The diamond shape in the middle of this crystal suggests that it broke in two – perhaps briefly – and then fused back together. The cracks and other faults that run into it heighten this feeling of being broken, and yet repaired. The wear to the crystal’s overall shape, combined with the patina from sublimation, adds to the character of this snow flake. In many ways, out of all the hundreds of snow crystals I’ve photographed (a fraction of which wind up here on this website) this is one of my favorites – for all its character and for the story that this minute piece of ice tells.

Snow Crystal Mandala is another favorite of this session. It is a detail of the center of the image below, and while it is not round (like a proper mandala should be) it does seem to have the intricacies and circular pattern of at least, a mandala-like image.

Stumbling across this image was an interesting experience. A few weeks ago I was contacted by a musician – Echo Mazur – who is performing a piece inspired by the manadala image. She was interested in using some snow crystals images as projected accompaniment for a performance. I'm not sure which, if any, images she plans to use, but the idea was enough of a nudge to get me thinking about the mandala image and snow crystals. And the nudge lead to this shot. 

 The final shot is one of the first of the day. A disk shaped snow crystal, worn around the edges, with a few air bubbles just percolating under the surface. The floret in the middle and the concentric bands in the disk shape remind me of the ripples in a pool of water after you toss a rock in.

I'm happy enough with this batch of photos to revive the "Imperfect Symmetry" moniker - first used with the 2005/06 snowflake photography season. So here we have Imperfect Symmetry II - it took long enough to get here, and in a fortnight or so I'll be shooting wildflowers, so fast is the earth spinning.

More Photos:

A few months ago, when I upgraded to a Pentax K10D digital SLR, I had an unpleasant surprise: the venerable X’s Drive II that had worked flawlessly with hundreds of compact flash card transfers was unable to reliably transfer the SD cards that the new camera used. And so – it was time for new portable storage device.

After actually doing some research, I settled on the CompactDrive PD70X. As you’d expect, CompactDrive’s latest offering is a big step forward from the now several year old X’s drive. After some debate I decided to get an 80 gigabyte drive installed in the compact drive housing – sufficient to hold the rather large DNG RAW files that the K10D kicks out. (I could have just used the smaller, proprietary PEF RAW format files, but what the heck…)

I bought the drive at www.mydigitaldiscount.com – the same place where I got the X’s drive years ago. Their price, including the drive, was competitive, and I’ve never had a problem with their service.

Here’s a run down of what I like, and don’t like, about the PD70X:

1. Speed: Leading the “like” list is the speed of file transfers. This drive is fast! My old and slow Kingston and PNY 1 gig CF cards transfer their full load onto the Compact Drive’s hard disk in just under 4 minutes. Much newer and faster SanDisk Extreme III SD cards can transfer 2 gigabytes of data in just over 5 minutes. The manual advises using high speed cards to achieve the best transfer rates, and that clearly seems to be the case. In any event – the PD70X is way ahead of the old X’s Drive II, which took about 15 minutes to download a single gigabyte CF card.

2. LED Display: The well thought out LED display provides you with the essential information needed to use the drive without a computer. First, there is a lasting icon that lets you know if the card transfer was successful or not. Unlike some drives that may just flash an ‘OK’ signal for a minute or so, the PD70X leaves an icon on the screen until you power it down – so you don’t have to guess about unattended card transfers. In addition, the drive display shows the available space on the installed hard drive, shows the progress of card transfers, and even shows the voltage output from the batteries. And if something does go wrong, there’s a pretty comprehensive set of error codes that help you diagnose the problem quickly.

3. Power Supply: When used in the field, any portable storage device is limited by the its battery life. Having a 40 or 80 gigabyte hard drive doesn’t do you much good if the device's batteries die after 2 gigabytes are transferred. The CompactDrive attacks this problem from two angles. Running off of 4 AA rechargeable NiMh batteries, the documentation claims that the drive can handle up to 80 gigabytes of transfer on a single charge. I haven’t come close to testing this in real use – but I have transferred several cards onto the drive without appearing to even dent the battery capacity. The other advantage is that – should the batteries be depleted – they are widely available AA batteries. It’s easy to pack a spare set in the bag and be sure of ample power. The drive itself serves as a battery charger, and simply plugging it into the AC adapter starts the process of charging the installed batteries. That said – I still have had a few problems finding the right batteries for this drive (see the “don’t likes” section….)

4. Build Quality: The aluminum housing of the PD70X looks very solid. Having broken a few pieces of plastic gear while shooting out in the bitter cold earlier this winter (temperatures so cold the plastic got brittle and fragile) the metal construction looks good

5. PC Interface: USB II and it downloads files as fast as any good external USB II drive. Nuf said.

OK – sounds pretty darn good. So what’s not to like? Well, I can always come up with something…

1. File structure: This is the only significant annoyance I’ve found thus far with this device. Like most portable storage drive, the PD70X creates sequentially numbered folders to store the contents of each card transfer. So, transfer 3 cards onto a brand new PD70X and you’ll get 3 folders – CARD0001.UHS, CARD0002.UHS, and CARD0003.UHS. The CARD####.UHS is the default folder naming convention – by adding a simple .txt file to the main directory you can change this to whatever you want.

BUT – the PD70X always writes to the first available entry in the directory. So – using the example above – if you decide to delete the CARD0001.UHS directory, and then save your 4th memory card to the drive, the drive creates a CARD0001.USH folder and saves to it. In other words – folder saves are not sequential.

I can see this being a real annoyance in the future. I keep files on the portable storage device as yet another level of backup, until the device starts to fill up. But – I also take a lot of silly photos and from time to time dump the same card to the drive a couple of times. The X’s drive saved file transfers sequentially – if the last folder number was number 895, the drive would simply save the next card as 896. Just by leaving the last folder used on the drive, the card dumps were always incremented forward, and you could always tell what folder was the most recent. This isn’t the case with the PD70X – and if you edit and delete folders it could be a nuisance to figure out which folder holds your most recent files.

2. Power Source: I thought this was on the “like” list. Well, it is, but there are still some limits. For one thing, I found some 1800 mAh batteries are not up to working with the PD70X – even though they are new batteries and have a fresh charge. The drive errors out during power up, with a #20 – No Hard Drive Present error. I assume that these particular batteries just can’t put out enough voltage to get the HD to even power up.

I upgraded to higher capacity batteries (2650 mAh) and they work fine, as NiMh batteries go. But they still suffer from the fundamental problem that they lose their charge when not in use. So if the drive sits in the bag for a week or two without a charge, the battery life is seriously compromised. And while the drive does have a built in charger – it is not a high speed charger. So you have to be sure to charge the drive up in advance.

3. CF Card Port: Maybe I worry too much, but the CF port on the PD70X is really shallow. CF card ports have lots of little wire pins. I’ve never had a problem with bent pins (though I’ve known more than a few folks who have) – BUT the CF ports I’ve used before have been very deep – deep enough for the card to get very well aligned and straightened out before it interfaces with those fragile wires. The shallow port on the PD70X means you have to be careful when inserting a card. So far I haven’t had any problems, but, like I said, I worry…

4. USB Cable: OK, I’m getting picky here, but a 3 foot long USB cable? Come on… It’s just long enough to plug into the front of the computer and put the drive next to the key board. OK – I can go buy a 6 foot able or a USB II mini hub, but that’s annoying…

Overall – the “like” obviously outweigh the “don’t likes” – and I’m looking forward to working with this drive. A bigger question – with the dropping price of CF and SD memory cards – is whether or not you need a portable storage device at all. For the same price as the PD70X I could have bought a bunch of SD cards. Given how cheap these cards are getting, it’s almost unnecessary to use any portable storage device. Personally, I prefer using the portable drive and carrying enough cards to cover a full day’s shooting – the best of both worlds.